My Culture and Me

This term we have been learning about our own culture and other cultures from people in our classroom. On Thursday we had a Culture Celebration Day. Everyone shared information about our culture. Some people dressed up in their traditional costumes. Everyone brought some traditional food for a shared kai. We tried things we had never eaten before. There was a huge selection. We had boxty, blini, Chinese peanut cookies, dumplings, Canadian maple syrup cookies, milk tart, cheesy eclairs, macarons and lots more. It was a great way to celebrate who we are.

Marae Noho

All of the Year 5 and 6 students enjoyed a fantastic noho marae experience at Takipu Marae near Te Karaka. The purpose of the noho was so we could experience local marae tikanga and kawa in a real context. The noho also provided the opportunity to build whānaungatanga, responsibility and teamwork skills.

We had a great couple of days. We had a Korero from Matua Antony about Takipu marae, and the kaiako from the Tairāwhiti Museum and Matua Luke from Turanga Health came out as well. We enjoyed learning traditional Māori games and looking at how  the Horouta Waka navigated to Aotearoa in the star dome. We ate lots of amazing food and had a big sleep over in the wharenui. It was a highight of our term.

Have you ever slept at a marae before?

Te Kurī a Pāoa

We have been been learning about Pāoa and Kiwa through art. When Pāoa and Kiwa came to Tairāwhiti, Young Nicks Head looked like Pāoa’s dog so they called it Te Kurī a Pāoa. Over time, soil erosion has made some of the rock erode. It wasn’t until Captain Cook came that it got called Young Nicks Head. 

A New Zealand graphic artist called Warren Pohatu was an author and illustrator of four books about Māori stories. We looked at his art and created our own Te Kurī a Pāoa. We had to overlay pastels, blend them and make colours we didn’t have by experimenting and mixing pastels. We also showed movement through detail.

Using Mote

 Lately we have seen a purple icon appear on our laptop screens. 

It's called Mote. It is a wonderful tool that lets you add audio to your google slides. Today we practised using it for the first time.

What do you think you could use mote for?

Learning Goals and Learning Dispositions

This week we have been thinking about our learning goals and what we have to do to achieve them. We used our school Learning Heroes. These Learning Heroes are the people who were on the Horouta waka that ended up in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, and Jesus. They all had different personalities and learning dispositions. What's a learning disposition? It's your attitude to learning. We thought about what we needed to change in our learning disposition to achieve our goals.

Have you ever set goals? What did you have to change about your attitude to learning to achieve them?

Our Favourite Toy

This week in Writing, we have been learning how to describe. Some people were learning how to use specific nouns, adjectives and juicy verbs, and others were learning how to use metaphors. Metaphors are similar to similes but instead of 'like' or 'as' we replaced them with 'is'. 

We first read a story from a person called Yasmin, then we used her template and wrote about our own favourite toy that we had when we were in kindy or preschool. In the first paragraph, we described what our toy looked like, and the second paragraph was about what happened to it.

We used Canva to publish our stories.

What is your favourite toy? Is it a teddy? Perhaps a toy car or doll? What did you do with your toy when you were little? 

Here's Camille's final piece...

Statistics

For the last 2 weeks, we have been learning to gather, sort and display multivariate data. We had to gather data about a question we wanted to find out about our new classmates. Then we put all our information onto google sheets and created bar graphs or pie graphs. Lastly, we had to make statements about the multivariate data we had gathered. This is the bit we found difficult. 

Here's Kylah's